Making War to Keep Peace (21 page)

NATION BUILDING IN HAITI

Establishing a new government is always difficult, especially after a violent rupture with a previous regime. Should those responsible for the violence be punished for mass murder, rape, or torture? At what point should the slate be wiped clean? These questions were being asked in Haiti, as in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and Russia. French scholar Raymond Aron says that it is always prudent to “prefer the limitation of violence to the punishment of the presumably guilty party.” Clinton took this approach when he accepted the Carter-Jonassaint Accord. Carter, Nunn, and Powell recommended trading the pleasures of revenge for a chance at national reconciliation, understanding that even against an adversary as small and weak as Haiti, war was never to be undertaken lightly.

Moving the country toward democracy was the main challenge. Haiti had virtually no experience with democracy; its traditionally personalist political system has made it difficult for Haitians to lay down arms against one another. Haiti was not a Latin regime with a strong army and a tradition of military rule, like the Dominican Republic. It had
no inherited democratic tradition, like the British Caribbean states. Haiti's politics had been dominated by a series of strongmen who ruled as long-term dictators. Some were generals; others, like Papa Doc, were chosen in elections that lacked most of the characteristics of democratic elections. Papa Doc's was no military government. As soon as he was elected, he disarmed the army and kept its weapons locked in an armory to which he alone had the key. He relied on the violence of the Tonton Macoutes, which ran the country like a protection racket, bullying, beating, and collecting “taxes” at will. And Aristide continued the tradition of corrupt rule. Though he was originally elected in a reasonably fair and free election, no sooner did he take office than he began to bypass parliament and the army and start using his network of private gangs to terrorize citizens.

Haiti's political culture emphasized violence, voodoo, and vengeance, and many Haitians saw politics as a winner-take-all zero-sum game. This did not breed trust, confidence, or consensus. The only hope for a viable government was to break the cycle of vengeance and rule by force. The Carter-Jonassaint Accord sought to end the cycle by permitting Cédras and his associates to step down with dignity, letting Aristide assume the presidency peaceably, and protecting the population against uncontrolled violence. It was a prudent course that increased the chance that democracy might take root, but the prospects were still not good. Democracy makes complex demands on people. It requires both participation and restraint, active citizenship, inclusive policies, and a modicum of good faith. These complex demands have proved hard for Haiti to meet, and the country has failed to make much progress toward a functioning democracy in the years since 1994.

The immediate outcomes of the Carter-Jonassaint Accord and Operation Uphold Democracy were not very impressive. The world's only superpower had managed to land forces in one of the world's smallest, poorest, and least developed countries. Those forces succeeded in destroying some arms caches and arresting some attachés who had formerly terrorized the population. The military leaders left Haiti, with Cédras going into exile in Panama. The U.S. government arranged for Aristide's return and the repeal of the economic embargo, and made commitments of economic aid.

It was announced that all judges would be fired and that most police and a large part of the armed forces were unfit to serve in the new regime. The situation was less dangerous than that in Somalia—Haiti was so small and unarmed that hostile persons were less able to cause problems for U.S. and UN troops. But the country lacked virtually all the requirements for a democratic government: rule of law, an elite with a shared commitment to democratic procedures, an educated populace, a sense of citizenship, a decent standard of living, and habits of trust and cooperation. Although no one could explain how this venture contributed to the U.S. national interest, the Clinton administration and various journalists termed it a success.
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On March 31, 1995, the multinational force was officially disbanded, and control passed to the UN Mission in Haiti (UNMIH), which was about six thousand strong and included more than twenty-three hundred American troops.
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UNMIH undertook the training of the Haitian police. Training the new recruits to respect citizens and protect personal security proved to be exceedingly difficult, as old patterns of corruption and violence remained.

The Clinton administration had much riding on the success and integrity of Operation Uphold Democracy. The plan had faced opposition in the Security Council and the OAS, but the administration had pushed forward. To avoid a failure of this operation comparable to the failure in Somalia, Clinton urgently pursued the campaign for democracy in Haiti.

THE RESTORATION OF ARISTIDE AND THE 1995 ELECTIONS

Parliamentary, municipal, and local elections were to be held within a few months of Aristide's return to power, but once again he flouted the law. Instead of holding elections by December 1994, he postponed them until February 4, 1995, when the terms of incumbent parliamentarians and local officials expired; this included the entire 83-seat Chamber of Deputies, two thirds of the 27-member Senate, 137 mayors, and 565 town council members. Aristide then ruled by decree.

As for the judicial branch, Aristide attempted to pack the Haitian high court with members of his Lavalas movement, without Senate ap
proval. He forced the minister of justice, Ernst Malebranche, to resign after he criticized Aristide for replacing appointed-for-life judges with political allies. As a Clinton aide wrote in March 1995, “The judicial system [in Haiti] is not only unjust; it barely exists.”
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And soon after returning to office, Aristide circulated to supporters a secret “watch list” of thirty persons charged with unspecified crimes against humanity. Some observers were concerned that the list heralded a campaign of repression against opposition candidates in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Instead of strengthening the rule of law, Aristide's policies under the American occupation only further destabilized the country. He eliminated the existing structure of police and military forces in Haiti, and reduced the army to one-quarter of its previous size. In February 1995, he dismissed all officers above the rank of major.
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He also tried to put in place a civil security force (consisting of followers who had committed human rights abuses in his earlier tenure) but was pressed by the United States to revise this politicized recruitment plan. This move was part of Aristide's general reliance on private militia—a practice with a long tradition in Haiti.

The U.S. government was relieved when the UNMIH took over at the end of March 1995. After several postponements, elections were finally held on June 25 under the protection of the UNMIH, which had approximately 6,000 members from twenty-one nations as well as 850 civilian police to reinforce the national police (roughly 3,500 in number).85 These forces should have been able to provide security for candidates and voters, but they were outmatched, and assassinations multiplied in advance of the elections.

Once again, Aristide's best-known opponents were among the targets. Mireille Durocher-Bertin, an articulate woman and determined opponent of Aristide, was shot dead on March 28.86 Her killer was never identified. Matsen Cadet, a candidate for mayor and an Aristide critic, was shot twice at a campaign rally. A Senate candidate and critic of Aristide was wounded and his driver killed. On June 27, Jean-Charles Henoc, an opposition candidate for a deputy seat, was assassinated. Another opposition candidate for the legislature, Duly Brutus, was arrested, jailed, and severely beaten in Port-au-Prince; he was released after he managed to pass written appeals to UN special envoy Lakhdor Brahimi and others.
In October, after Brutus testified in Washington, DC, his house was attacked by a mob some three hundred strong. Violence continued to spread, often carried by mobs shouting “Aristide or death.” On September 12, Ambassador Colin Granderson, chief of the UN/OAS Civilian Mission in Haiti, said there had been at least twenty commando-style killings of political figures in Haiti in 1995.
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Shortly before the June elections, the Haitian Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), which Aristide had staffed with loyalists, announced that a million voter registration cards had been stolen. As the Carter Center reported: “[I]nstead of building confidence in an electoral process, the government and the CEP—by their words, actions and inaction—eroded confidence. Instead of building bonds with the political parties by listening to their concerns and complaints and responding in an expeditious and helpful manner, the CEP stiff-armed the parties and never responded to their complaints.”
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Repeated delays in publishing voter and candidate lists meant that few voters knew much about the elections. All suggestions for reforming the CEP were stonewalled. The Carter Center's Robert Pastor said that “Aristide rejected any change” in the system, and instead he “appointed figures that were viewed as even more biased in favor of Lavalas,” effectively making the CEP an arm of the party.
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On June 24, the day before the elections, the International Republican Institute issued a report concluding that “the pre-electoral process and environment in Haiti has seriously challenged the most minimally accepted standards for the holding of a credible election.”
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About 30 percent of registered voters participated in the polling on June 25.91 As Pastor reported:

Reruns were finally held on August 13, and runoffs followed on September 17. Lavalas won all the Senate races, giving the party seventeen of
twenty-seven seats in the Senate, and sixty-six of eighty-three seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
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Voter turnout for the runoffs was 14 percent—indicating that electoral legitimacy had suffered.
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Nonetheless, the Clinton administration initially sought to cast the elections in a positive light. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake commented, “What an extraordinary act it is to have conducted elections in Haiti on time when a year ago if a Haitian expressed freely a political view, he or she risked having his or her face cut…And today, millions of Haitians expressed those political views in safety.”
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U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) director Brian Atwood, who headed the administration delegation observing the elections, called them “a major step forward for democracy in Haiti.” He added, “There are problems, but we are confident that they will be resolved.”
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In a State Department briefing on June 27, Atwood elaborated:

U.S. embassy spokesman Stan Schrager described the elections as “the most free, most complex, and least violent” in Haiti's history.
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The secretary-general of the OAS issued a statement declaring that “from all indications, electors were able to exercise their franchise freely.”
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Officials from the OAS, the UN, the Clinton administration, and labor groups were unanimous in pronouncing the elections free and fair.
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Yet in the weeks that followed the OAS, the UN, and the Carter Center all issued reports detailing extensive election irregularities—from the CEP's disqualification of candidates without explanation, to mistakes on the ballots (including candidates' names or symbols being left off the ballot), fraud in counting the votes, and the burning of a polling office.
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In December 1995, a presidential election was held. The constitution of Haiti says that the president may not succeed himself, and this provision applied to Aristide, even though the coup had deprived him of three years of his term.
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His handpicked successor, René Préval, won the December presidential election. Aristide, out of office, continued to wield considerable power over Haitian government.

In his January 1996 State of the Union address, President Clinton declared that the dictators had fled and “democracy has a new day in Haiti.” But the administration's effort to restore democracy was running into new trouble. Clinton invoked executive privilege to deny congressional access to forty-seven documents said to concern political assassins connected with the personal security force of the new Haitian president, René Préval. The chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Benjamin Gilman (R-NY), called Clinton's refusal to cooperate in an investigation of the Haitian government's connection to the murder of political opponents “a blatant abuse of power to cover up a massive foreign policy failure in Haiti.”
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Administration officials and the U.S. ambassador in Port-au-Prince knew that violent agents of the government had prevented the participation of opposition leaders in the 1995 elections, and that President Préval's U.S.-trained security guards took part in political violence during 1996, but the desire to claim success in Haiti was apparently stronger than a commitment to open discussion of the problems.